John Dunn

Gentile v Steiner

Tuesday, 27 August 2024 at 21:36

Gentile v Steiner

For Gentile, who had pushed idealist philosophy to the extreme by equating reality with thinking, a world of percepts could only ever be understood as the Kantian residue of unacceptable presuppositions. It was on this basis that he critiqued Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom as not really leaving the individual free at all. According to Steiner however, that which was once considered to be unknowable i.e. the Kantian noumena, is made known, and it is the universality of thinking that makes this possible. This was exactly the point that Gentile rejected in his review of Steiner’s book. He was uneasy about the individual being subject to the universal. How can this be freedom? He missed Steiner’s point that if the unthinking and habitual ego is subjected by the thinking or spiritual ego, then the individual subjects himself to himself. ‘That man alone is free’, wrote Steiner, ‘who in every moment of his life is able to obey only himself’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Hegel meets Plato in Steiner

Sunday, 25 August 2024 at 21:57

Rudolf Steiner

Hegel meets Plato in Steiner

The critical point for Steiner is that the reality of the percepts is not exhausted in the perceiving of them. The act of perceiving a percept can only ever result in a partial view. The fullness of reality about anything perceived can only come from thinking about it. Whereas the perceiving is only ever partial, the thinking is always universal. (For example, separate individuals will perceive an actual triangle in different ways, from different viewpoints, but in thinking will always agree on the characteristics of a triangle, i.e. it is the thinking that is universal, not the individual perception.)

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Gentile and Steiner

Saturday, 24 August 2024 at 21:33

Rudolf Steiner

Gentile and Steiner

Like Gentile, Steiner too dispensed with naive realism, i.e. the notion that our understanding of the world is simply a reflection in the mind of what we receive into it via sense perceptions. Such an existence, in which reality is delivered to us without our contribution, based on passive observation and contemplation, was dismissed by Steiner with contempt. So far as these things are concerned, Gentile would have nothing to argue with Steiner about. Gentile even described Steiner’s critique of Kantian critical idealism as one of the most beautiful parts of the book. Where Gentile parted company with Steiner was on the point of the presupposed. For Gentile, the act of thinking constitutes reality. Nothing can presuppose thinking. But the world for Steiner would not be thought of if it was not first perceived. There is a given element in Steiner’s philosophy that was unacceptable to Gentile. Steiner described this given element as consisting of percepts, i.e. the things that are perceived by the individual about the world that exists around him.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Gentile and Steiner

Friday, 23 August 2024 at 21:41

Rudolf Steiner

Gentile and Steiner

Like Gentile, Steiner too dispensed with naive realism, i.e. the notion that our understanding of the world is simply a reflection in the mind of what we receive into it via sense perceptions. Such an existence, in which reality is delivered to us without our contribution, based on passive observation and contemplation, was dismissed by Steiner with contempt. So far as these things are concerned, Gentile would have nothing to argue with Steiner about. Gentile even described Steiner’s critique of Kantian critical idealism as one of the most beautiful parts of the book. Where Gentile parted company with Steiner was on the point of the presupposed. For Gentile, the act of thinking constitutes reality. Nothing can presuppose thinking. But the world for Steiner would not be thought of if it was not first perceived. There is a given element in Steiner’s philosophy that was unacceptable to Gentile. Steiner described this given element as consisting of percepts, i.e. the things that are perceived by the individual about the world that exists around him.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Gentile and Steiner

Thursday, 22 August 2024 at 21:34

Rudolf Steiner

Gentile and Steiner

In ever cease to be astonished at the journey I have undertaken. When I first came across the work of Rudolf Steiner, I thought immediately of its relationship to Gentile’s philosophy. I later discovered that Gentile had reviewed Steiner’s seminal philosophical statement. Surely out of this meeting of minds some progress towards answering the ‘who am I?’ question might be made.

In September 1919, Benedetto Croce invited Gentile to review, for La Critica (the bi-monthly magazine edited by Croce), The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner.139 On the first of October, Gentile confirmed that he had received the book and undertook to send the review as soon as possible. This was published in the 20th November issue of the same year. The Philosophy of Freedom was the foundational work of Steiner’s voluminous output. Upon this work the rest of the edifice that came to be known as Anthroposophy stands or falls. Steiner’s argument is that there is nothing that cannot be known. At a stroke he swept aside the Kantian residue, i.e. the idealist theory that there is a world of unknowable entities, the things- in-themselves or noumena, that form the basis of everything we perceive and act upon in the mind.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Some core truth

Wednesday, 21 August 2024 at 21:49

Zarathustra, Nicholas Roerich, 1931

Some core truth

So where has Gentile led us? If truth is to be found in thinking only, and if this criterion of truth is the Logos, then we are left with pure Logos. Is this the answer to my ‘who am I?’ question? I am pure Logos? But surely truth would never ask of itself - what is truth? Gentile’s Actualism was unable to account for the universally recognised fact that thinking is attached to the human individual, in fact, uniquely attached. Remember back to Ilyenkov’s conception of man as ‘substance that thinks’?

Does this mean that thinking adopts the individual in order to think? And if thinking is pure Logos, that must make me as an individual Logos incarnated. Could this really be the answer to the ‘who am I?’ question?Are we not relating to some core truth in the life of Jesus of Nazareth here, foreshadowed by Prometheus and Zarathustra and echoed in Dante and Coleridge?

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Outer limits of philosophical idealism

Tuesday, 20 August 2024 at 21:51

Giovanni Gentile

Outer limits of philosophical idealism

The outstanding characteristic of Gentile’s Actualism was its attempt to develop a metaphysics (a system of morality) without the use of presuppositions. In such an attempt, the resultant metaphysics must be based upon a Logos, which is not previous to thinking but is within the act of thinking itself. And yet, by starting with the ‘I’ that thinks, Gentile did in fact allow a presupposition. This was surely inconsistent. But if he had started with the act of thinking, he would have lost the very ‘I’ that he and Fichte and Coleridge had endeavoured to protect from the all-consuming Spinozist Substance. It is clear that Gentile had reached the outer limits of philosophical idealism. If he extended the logic of his own argument, thinking would take place without the thinker. If this were the case, no man as an individual, not even Gentile, is real. It is only the act of thinking which is real, and as such it cannot be attached to an unreal thinker. Hence to speak of my thought or of Gentile’s thought or of anyone’s thought is to refer to abstract entities.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.